After Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there (1872), The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is the third masterpiece of the Lewis Carroll’s nonsense trilogy. Even though its not so broadly know, The Hunting of the Snark flies at least so high as the Alice books in matters of creativity, but for many, it presents even bigger and more scaring enigmas. The HOS is a tragic-comic poem over which an unstable, sensitive soul might very well go mad. Certainly it’s not children who ought to read this nonsensical epic, which should be read by

Sages and gray-haired philosophers… in order to study that darkest problem of metaphysics, the borderland between reason and unreason, and the nature of the most erratic of spiritual forces, humor, which certainly dances between the two. That we do find a pleasure in certain long and elaborate stories, in certain complicated and curious forms of diction, which have no intelligible meaning whatever, is not a subject for children to play with; it is a subject for psychologists to go mad over. (1)